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Missingno
Here’s one of the most famous video-game glitches of all time! Back in the days of Pokémon Red and Blue, glitches were common, but there’s one that stood above the rest. Its name is MissingNo., and it’s looked upon both as a programming quirk, and as an Easter egg. If you own a copy of either Pokémon Red, or Pokémon Blue, and have never heard of MissingNo., then good for you! It’s not a glitch that I encourage seeking out due to its unstable properties. But if you don’t really care what happens to your game, then here’s how MissingNo. works! MissingNo. is famous for a couple of things; the first of which being its appearance. This glitch takes the form of a Pokémon you can catch. When it appears, it can appear as a multitude of things. Depending on the characters in your name, it can appear as multiple Pokémon fossils or even a ghost, but the most common form seen is a squared “d” shape made up of pixels. When you run into MissingNo., it may not be named “Missingno.” You could (if you didn’t use any of the game’s default names) run into its sister glitch, ‘M, which has slightly different properties but works the same. If you were to catch this Pokémon, you would run into all sorts of problems. You would come across many graphical errors and may even have to start a new game. So, why do people go out of they’re way to catch a glimpse of this legendary data-troll? After encountering this bug, the sixth item in your bag is set to increase in quantity be 128. This is the feature of MissingNo. that people love to exploit. Some people like to experiment in trading the glitch and battling with the glitch. People have discovered that, in Pokémon Red and Blue, MissingNo. is a dual type Pokémon, one type being Normal, and the other being a mysterious “Bird” type. It’s number 000 in the Pokedex, and starts off knowing Water Gun twice and Sky Attack. While I don’t recommend going after this glitch at all, if you do, you absolutely shouldn’t catch it. If you feel like seeing MissingNo., here’s the most common means of encounter, the old man glitch. To start off, the way encountering Pokémon in these games works, is by assigning values to specific areas, like tall grass or caves, that calls on a specific Pokémon in the data buffer (let’s just say that the data buffer is just the database of all the game’s potential information.) This value is coded in something called hexadecimal code, which sets a more comprehensive variety of values by using digits 0-9 and characters a-f in combination to crate big numbers (a lot like bytes.) To help make this much easier to understand, “2AF3″ in hexadecimal is equal to 10,995. Why am I telling you about hexadecimal? Because it’s how the old man glitch works. The Old Man Glitch, How and Why: Step one of using this glitch is learning to catch Pokémon. No, I’m not joking around here. Even if you know how to use a Pokeball, the tutorial starts this glitch off. There’s an old man in Viridian City that teaches you how to catch Pokémon by catching a Weedle. Why does this matter? Well, remember how I said every wild area has a hexadecimal value to call on Pokémon encounters? Well, during this tutorial, your name is set to the hexadecimal encounter value. This is why your encounter with MissingNo. or ‘M differs on your name. Just so you know, a code as long and as variant as your name holds a value extremely high, higher than any other Pokémon in the game. After the old man catches the Weedle, you’ll be standing in Viridian with an encounter value equal to your name. If you walk into any wild area (like route 2,) though, the code will reset to the value of the current area. Step two of seeking out this mysterious programming quirk is to use this code to encounter a Pokémon. Since the code resets whenever you step into a wild area, like tall grass or a cave, you shouldn’t just run around anywhere. There are two encounter areas in these games that have no encounter value, the eastern shores of Cinnabar and the Seafoam Islands. These areas don’t have a value, so they basically inherit the previous area’s code. So, if you are surfing along the ocean to Cinnabar, when you get there, you’ll encounter all of the same Pokémon you ran into on the way there. Now, with the Seafoam Islands this may work, but with Cinnabar, a place you can fly to, there’s just one problem. If you fly directly from Viridian to Cinnabar, your encounter value will still be equal to your name. Now if you surf on the eastern shore so that your fin is still touching land, you will technically still be at Cinnabar, and your code will remain the same. Step three is to encounter MissingNo.! Surf up and down the island until you that hexadecimal code tries to call on a Pokémon. When you finally run into something, the hexadecimal code (still equal to your name) will try to pull a nonexistent Pokémon out of the data buffer, and do you know what happens when you try to battle a Pokémon that doesn’t exist? MissingNo. happens! The developers created a subroutine for this exact situation, like an error code, but this error code is far to complex to be assigned a number. After running into MissingNo., run away immediately. There are actually other ways to see MissingNo., but I won’t be covering those. For now, enjoy the old man glitch! Category:Exploits Category:Glitch Pokémon